Thanks for the comment and glad to hear you read the blog.

You are, of course, right. As with any information you need to be sure where it’s come from and that the source is informed and trustworthy. I think there are a couple of things that are inherent to social media and social networking that can help here:

1) People usually tell you lots about who they are. Most people’s Twitter profiles have links to their blogs where you can read a lot more about what they say, think and know; and of course you can usually look back through all the previous updates they’ve written. To some extent we now have a surfeit of information – we know more about people than we ever did before. So to some extent we can check the authenticity of commentators based on what else we can find out about them

2) With almost all events, there will be more than one person reporting it. Whilst lots of people can be simultaneously wrong, this kind of peer validation is another good tool to use. If something is real then the chances are more than one person you know will be reporting on it.

So – if there’s an update from somebody you can’t find anything else about, and on a subject nobody else reports, then the chances are I’d trust it less. Of course in reality things are less black and white than this.

Twitter’s great – I only started using it when we were experimenting with it at work for various internal things. But then people I don’t know started following me and it’s grown from there.

Sign up for an account, see if anybody else you know is on there and then add more ‘similar’ people using something like http://www.whoshouldifollow.com. Then take it from there. As I was told once, if nothing else the 140 word limit will help you to perfect your brief web 2.0 writing style (something I’ve clearly broken with this response!)

Matt

I’ve newly been following your blog and I have yet to explore twitter though I’ve been reading a lot about it and trying to wrap my head around it. Do you ever worry about credibility in terms of relying on these types of sources? That would be my only worry. As someone with a journalism background I think having credible sources is of utmost importance, because obviously without them, your own credibility could be threatened. Just a thought…interesting post!